The current trend in audio speaker in general, and in audio speakers utilized in automobiles in particular, is to make the speakers increasingly powerful while keeping their size to a minimum. The more powerful the speaker, the more current flows through the voice coil of the speaker, and therefore the more heating there is of the voice coil. However, minimizing the size of the speaker significantly limits the ability to use conventional heat sink techniques with such speakers. Further, because of thc limited energy available in an automobile, it is desirable that heat removal/heat sinking from a speaker coil be passive rather than active (i.e., that it not require the use of an extra energy-consuming device such as a fan or blower).
While many techniques have been used for removing heat from voice coils, and many additional techniques have been proposed, most of these techniques involve either active cooling through use of a fan or the like and/or the use of additional space-consuming hardware in the form of a vented heat sink or the like. A need therefore exists for a simple and relatively inexpensive technique for removing heat from the voice coil of a speaker, particularly a high performance speaker, and more specifically one adapted for automotive use, which technique does not require either the use of an active cooling component or the use of an extra piece of heat dissipation hardware, but instead requires only the use of components normally existing in such a speaker.